By David Taylor
Following his graduation from Channelview High School and Sam Houston State University, David Brady carved out a career that led him to leadership roles in distinguished organizations such as the Houston Zoo, Houston Rockets, Houston Astros, and the Houston Texans to name a few. Along the way, he built a reputation for having a niche at being able to drive revenue and build brands wherever he landed.
On Friday, Aug. 2, David shared some of that wisdom with members of the North Channel Area Chamber of Commerce monthly luncheon hosted by the City of Jacinto City.
Brady grew up in Channelview and he lived on South Brentwood Street. His family moved there in 1939. Brady has also devoted time to the Houston Dynamo, and nonprofits like the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and the American Red Cross during Hurricane Harvey.
During his nine-year tenure at the Houston Zoo, he spearheaded initiatives that significantly increased annual attendance from 1.5 million to over 2.5 million. He is best known for his highly successful creation of the annual Zoo Lights festival each year.
Brady also worked as an executive in the Houston Texans organization and for the past 18 seasons has been the ‘Voice of Texans Gameday’ as the public address announcer for Texans home games.
He took his successful career and parleyed it into a new business as Brady Strategic Partners specializing in executive coaching and strategic planning for small and mid-size organizations.
“I spent the first part of my career in sports before pivoting to nonprofit and then some other ventures,” he told the chamber.
He spoke on how to treat a business like sports teams treat their franchises and how they perform on the field can be impactful to your own business.
“Look at some of the things that sports teams do really well that you don’t know they’re doing because you’re just watching the games and the matches. A lot of businesses should be doing the same including collaboration, strategic planning, and ongoing development.
“It’s not hard to imagine your business as a team. For example, head coaches are like business owners, presidents and CEOs. Your managers are like assistant coaches and staff. Your employees are like players. For our conversation today, our customers or clients are fans,” he explained.
In earlier days, baseball teams did spring training because players did nothing during offseason to stay in shape. These days, Brady described it, they come back to work on strategy, do SWOT analysis, and mentorship. SWOT analysis is a framework for identifying and analyzing an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
“How many times do we get in an organization and our team members don’t collaborate with each other, don’t look at succession planning, right? That’s one of the biggest mistakes companies make, those that I deal with is they don’t look at succession planning, and succession planning doesn’t need to be you’re the next person. You’re in line for this job, but it’s about development. It’s about training. It’s about preparing multiple people in your organization for that role,” he explained.
The other thing that sports teams do in training and development is they do performance reviews. “They can do it on a very consistent basis. If you watch the Texans game, you’ll see the players come over to the bench. They’ve got their Microsoft Surface out going through plays. They’re looking at what they could have done differently, what they could have done better. They’re learning at half time to talk about what they could have done differently and what they should be doing next. They’re constantly doing this,” Brady told members.
He also said a business should capitalize on adaptability.
“How do you adapt when a hurricane comes in knocks out power for four or five days? How do you adapt for your customers?” he asked.
He also recommended recognition programs.
“It’s a perfect example to me of how sports teams are finding new ways to celebrate success. Normally, the MVP gets the trophy at the end of the Super Bowl at the end of the game and that’s who gets interviewed. The University of Miami wanted to celebrate as many players as they could, so they came up with a ‘turnover chain.’ When a player on Miami’s team recovers a fumble, intercepts a pass, recovers a kickoff, they wear the ‘turnover chain.’ The TV coverage gets focused on them,” he said.
Celebrate the company or organizations victories with an email to recognize employees, recognize birthdays and anniversaries, and post them on all your social media.
Lastly, he said to connect with customers or clients.
“One of the things your business should be doing is getting lots of feedback, and you should be reflecting on what you’ve done to help you prepare to move forward. One of the great things that Texans have done under Cal McNair since he became owner is they created the Houston Texans Fan Council,” Brady shared.
The fans are able to look at all issues facing the team.
“The new logo evolution that the Texans made this year came out of the Fan Council, and some of the things I do on the PA have been suggestions from the Fan Council,” he said.
He encouraged chamber members to create raving fans with their business and adopt some of those principles sports teams use.